by Klaus Schwab
Figure VII: Use of 3D Printing in Various Areas (% of respondents*)
* Percentages are of respondents from the Sculpteo survey.
Source: Sculpteo, The State of 3D Printing (survey of 1,000 people), as published in Hedstrom, J., “The State of 3D Printing…”, Quora100
Positive impacts
– More personalized products and personal fabrication
– Creating niche products, and making money selling them
– Fastest growth of 3D printing where each customer has slightly different needs from a product – e.g. a particular shaped foot requires a specially sized shoe
– Reduced logistics costs, with the possibility of huge energy savings101
– Contributing to abundant local activities; crafting own goods that benefit from the removal of logistics costs (circular economy)
Negative impacts
– Global and regional supply and logistics chain: lower demand resulting in job losses
– Gun control: opening opportunities for printing objects with high levels of abuse, such as guns
– Growth in waste for disposal, and further burden on the environment
– Major disruption of production controls, consumer regulations, trade barriers, patents, taxes and other government restrictions; and, the struggle to adapt
The shift in action
Almost 133,000 3D printers were shipped worldwide in 2014, a 68% increase from 2013. The majority of printers, selling for under $10,000, are thus suitable for applications from labouratories and schools to small manufacturing businesses. As a result, the size of the 3D materials and services industry grew strongly, to $3.3 billion.102
Shift 22: Designer Beings 103
The tipping point: The first human whose genome was directly and deliberately edited is born
Since the turn of the century, the cost of sequencing an entire human genome has fallen by almost six orders of magnitude. The human genome project spent $2.7 billion to produce the first entire genome in 2003. By 2009 the cost per genome was down to 100k while today it is possible for researchers to pay a lab specialising in such matters only $1000 to sequence a human genome. A similar trend has occurred more recently in genome editing with the development of the CRISPR/Cas9 method, which is being widely adopted due to its higher effectiveness and efficiency and lower cost than previous approaches.
The real revolution is hence not the sudden ability for dedicated scientists to edit the genes of plants and animals, but rather the increased ease that new sequencing and editing technologies provide, vastly increasing the number of researchers who are able to conduct experiments
Positive impacts
– Higher agricultural yields thanks to crops and crop treatments which are more robust, effective and productive
– More effective medical therapies via personalised medicine
– Faster, more accurate, less invasive medical diagnostics
– Higher levels of understanding of human impact on nature
– Reduced incidence of genetic disease and related suffering
Negative impacts
– Risk of interaction between edited plants/animals human/environmental health
– Exacerbated inequality due to high cost of access to therapies
– Social backlash or rejection of gene editing technologies
– Misuse of genetic data by governments or companies
– International disagreements about ethical use of genome editing technologies
Unknown or cuts both ways
– Increased longevity
– Ethical dilemmas regarding nature of humanity
– Cultural shifts
The shift in action
“In March 2015, leading scientists publish a Nature article calling for a moratorium on editing human embryos, highlighting “grave concerns regarding the ethical and safety implications of this research”. Only one month later, in April 2015, “Researchers led by Junjiu Huang of Yat-sen University in Guangzhou published the world’s first scientific paper on altering the DNA of human embryos.”
Sources: http://www.nature.com/news/don-t-edit-the-human-germ-line-1.17111;
http://qz.com/389494/chinese-researchers-are-the-first-to-genetically-modify-a-human-embryo-and-many-scientists-think-theyve-gone-too-far/
Shift 23: Neurotechnologies 104
The tipping point: The first human with fully artificial memory implanted in the brain
There is not one area of our personal and professional lives that cannot benefit from a better understanding of how our brain functions – at both the individual and collective levels. This is underscored by the fact that – over the past few years - two of the most funded research programs in the world are in brain sciences: The Human Brain Project (a €1 billion project over 10 years funded by the European Commission) and President Obama’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Although these programs are primarily focused on scientific and medical research, we are also witnessing the rapid growth (and influence) of neurotechnologies in non-medical aspects of our lives. Neurotechnology consists of monitoring brain activity and looking at how the brain changes and/or interfaces with the world.
In 2015, for example, the portability and the affordability of neuro-headsets (which already cost less than a gaming console) offer unprecedented possibilities - marking what is likely to be not only a neuro-revolution, but also a societal one105.
Positive impacts
– Disabled people can now control prosthetic limbs or wheel-chairs “with their minds”.
– Neurofeedback, the possibility to monitor brain activity in real time, offers countless possibilities to help fight addictions, regulate food behaviour, and improve performances ranging from sports to the classroom.
– Being able to collect, process, store and compare large amounts of brain activity-related data allows us to improve diagnosis and treatment efficiency of brain disorders and mental health-related issues.
– The law will be able to provide customized processing on cases and address responsibility issues in criminal cases in a differential fashion rather than in a generic one now.
– The next generation of computers, whose design has been informed by brain science, may reason, predict and react just like the human cortex (an area of the brain known as the seat of intelligence).
Negative impacts
– Brain-based discrimination: Individuals are not just their brains, as such there is a risk for decisions to be made in a context-independent fashion, based only on brain data in fields ranging from the law to HR, consumer behaviour or education106.
– Fear of what thoughts/dreams/desires to be decrypted and for privacy to no longer exist,
– Fear of creativity or the human touch to slowly but surely disappear, mainly carried so far by overselling what brain sciences can do.
– Blurring the lines between man and machine
Unknown, or cuts both ways
– Cultural shift
– Disembodiment of communication
– Improvement of performance
– Extending human cognitive abilities will trigger new behaviours
The shift in action
– Cortical computing algorithms have already shown an ability to solve modern CAPTCHAs (widely used tests to distinguish humans from machines).
– The automotive industry has developed systems monitoring attention and awareness that can stop cars when people are falling asleep while driving.
– An intelligent computer program in China scored better than many human adults on an IQ test.
– IBM’s Watson supercomputer, after sifting through millions of medical records and databases, has begun to help doctors choose treatment options for patients with complex needs.
– Neuromorphic image sensors, i.e. inspired how the eye and brain communicate, will have impact ranging from battery usage to robotics
– Neuroprosthetics are allowing di
sabled people to control artificial members and exoskeletons. Some blind people will be able to see (again).
– The Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program by DARPA is a precursor to memory restoration and enhancement
– Depression symptoms in mice could be cured by the artificial reactivation of happy memories as evidenced by Neuroscientists at MIT
Doraiswamy M. (2015). 5 brain technologies that will shape our future. World Economic Forum Agenda, Aug 9
https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/08/5-brain-technologies-future/
Fernandez A (2015). 10 neurotechnologies about to transform brain enhancement and brain health. SharpBrains, USA, Nov 10
http://sharpbrains.com/blog/2015/11/10/10-neurotechnologies-about-to-transform-brain-enhancement-and-brain-health/
Notes
1 The terms “disruption” and “disruptive innovation” have been much discussed in business and management strategy circles, most recently in Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald, What is Disruptive Innovation?, Harvard Business Review, December 2015. While respecting the concerns of Professor Christensen and his colleagues about definitions, I have employed the broader meanings in this book.
2 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014.
3 James Manyika and Michael Chui, “Digital Era Brings Hyperscale Challenges”, The Financial Times, 13 August 2014.
4 The designer and architect Neri Oxman offers a fascinating example of what I just described. Her research lab works at the intersection of computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering and synthetic biology.
https://www.ted.com/talks/neri_oxman_design_at_the_intersection_of_technology_and_biology
5 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, with contributions from Citi Research, “Technology at Work – The Future of Innovation and Employment”, Oxford Martin School and Citi, February 2015.
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/Citi_GPS_Technology_Work.pdf
6 David Isaiah, “Automotive grade graphene: the clock is ticking”, Automotive World, 26 August 2015.
http://www.automotiveworld.com/analysis/automotive-grade-graphene-clock-ticking/
7 Sarah Laskow, “The Strongest, Most Expensive Material on Earth”, The Atlantic,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/the-strongest-most-expensive-material-on-earth/380601/
8 Some of the technologies are described in greater detail in: Bernard Meyerson, “Top 10 Technologies of 2015”, Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies, World Economic Forum, 4 March 2015.
https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/03/top-10-emerging-technologies-of-2015-2/
9 Tom Goodwin, “In the age of disintermediation the battle is all for the consumer interface”, TechCrunch, March 2015.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/
10 K.A. Wetterstrand, “DNA Sequencing Costs: Data from the NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program (GSP)”, National Human Genome Research Institute, 2 October 2015.
http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/
11 Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Watson’s Next Feat? Taking on Cancer”, The Washington Post, 27 June 2015.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/06/27/watsons-next-feat-taking-on-cancer/
12 Jacob G. Foster, Andrey Rzhetsky and James A. Evans, “Tradition and Innovation in Scientists’ Research Strategies”, American Sociological Review, October 2015 80: 875-908
http://www.knowledgelab.org/docs/1302.6906.pdf
13 Mike Ramsay and Douglas Cacmillan, “Carnegie Mellon Reels After Uber Lures Away Researchers”, Wall Street Journal, 31 May 2015
http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-uber-a-friend-or-foe-of-carnegie-mellon-in-robotics-1433084582
14 World Economic Forum, Deep Shift – Technology Tipping Points and Societal Impact, Survey Report, Global Agenda Council on the Future of Software and Society, September 2015.
15 For more details on the survey methodology, please refer to pages 4 and 39 of the report referenced in the previous note.
16 UK Office of National Statistics, “Surviving to Age 100”, 11 December 2013, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifetables/historic-and-projected-data-from-the-period-and-cohort-life-tables/2012-based/info-surviving-to-age-100.html
17 The Conference Board, Productivity Brief 2015, 2015.
According to data compiled by The Conference Board data, global labour productivity growth in the period 1996-2006 averaged 2.6%, compared to 2.1% for both 2013 and 2014.
https://www.conference-board.org/retrievefile.cfm?filename=The-Conference-Board-2015-Productivity-Brief.pdf&type=subsite
18 United States Department of Labor, “Productivity change in the nonfarm business sector, 1947-2014”, Bureau of Labor Statistics
http://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm
19 United States Department of Labor, “Preliminary multifactor productivity trends, 2014”, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 23 June 2015
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod3.nr0.htm
20 OECD, “The Future of Productivity”, July 2015. http://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/The-future-of-productivity-policy-note-July-2015.pdf
For a short discussion on decelerating US productivity, see: John Fernald and Bing Wang, “The Recent Rise and Fall of Rapid Productivity Growth”, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 9 February 2015.
http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/2015/february/economic-growth-information-technology-factor-productivity/
21 The economist Brad DeLong makes this point in: J. Bradford DeLong, “Making Do With More”, Project Syndicate, 26 February 2015.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/abundance-without-living-standards-growth-by-j--bradford-delong-2015-02
22 John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” in Essays in Persuasion, Harcourt Brace, 1931.
23 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?”, Oxford Martin School, Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, University of Oxford, 17 September 2013. http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf
24 Shelley Podolny, “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?”, The New York Times, 7 March 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/if-an-algorithm-wrote-this-how-would-you-even-know.html?_r=0
25 Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots, Basic Books, 2015.
26 Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation – The Future of Working for Yourself, Grand Central Publishing, 2001.
27 Quoted in: Farhad Manjoo, “Uber’s business model could change your work”, The New York Times, 28 January 2015.
28 Quoted in: Sarah O’Connor, “The human cloud: A new world of work”, The Financial Times, 8 October 2015.
29 Lynda Gratton, The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here, Collins, 2011.
30 R. Buckminster Fuller and E.J. Applewhite, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, Macmillan, 1975.
31 Eric Knight, “The Art of Corporate Endurance”, Harvard Business Review, April 2, 2014
https://hbr.org/2014/04/the-art-of-corporate-endurance
32 VentureBeat, “WhatsApp now has 700M users, sending 30B messages per day”, January 6 2015
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/06/whatsapp-now-has-700m-users-sending-30b-messages-per-day/
33 Mitek and Zogby Analytics, Millennial Study 2014 , September 2014
https://www.miteksystems.com/sites/default/files/Documents/zogby_final_embargo_14_9_25.pdf
34 Gillian Wong, “Alibaba Tops Singles’ Day Sales Record Despite Slowing China Economy”, The Wall Street Journal, 11 November 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/alibaba-smashes-singles-day-sales-record-1447234536
35 “The Mobile Economy: Sub-Saharan Africa 2014”, GSM Association,
2014.
http://www.gsmamobileeconomyafrica.com/GSMA_ME_SubSaharanAfrica_Web_Singles.pdf
36 Tencent, “Announcement of results for the three and nine months ended 30 September 2015”
http://www.tencent.com/en-us/content/ir/an/2015/attachments/20151110.pdf
37 MIT, “The ups and downs of dynamic pricing”, innovation@work Blog, MIT Sloan Executive Education, 31 October 2014.
http://executive.mit.edu/blog/the-ups-and-downs-of-dynamic-pricing#.VG4yA_nF-bU
38 Giles Turner, “Cybersecurity Index Beat S&P500 by 120%. Here’s Why, in Charts”, Money Beat, The Wall Street Journal, 9 September 2015.
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/09/09/cybersecurity-index-beats-sp-500-by-120-heres-why-in-charts/
39 IBM, “Redefining Boundaries: Insights from the Global C-Suite Study,” November 2015.
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/c-suite/study/
40 Global e-Sustainability Initiative and The Boston Consulting Group, Inc, “GeSI SMARTer 2020: The Role of ICT in Driving a Sustainable Future”, December 2012.
http://gesi.org/SMARTer2020
41 Moisés Naím, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be, Basic Books, 2013.
The book attributes the end of power to three revolutions: the “more” revolution, the mobility revolution, and the mentality revolution. It is careful in not identifying the role of information technology as predominant but there is no doubt that the more, the mobility and the mentality owe a lot to the digital age and the diffusion of new technologies.
42 This point is made and developed in: “The Middle Kingdom Galapagos Island Syndrome: The Cul-De-Sac of Chinese Technology Standards”, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), 15 December 2014.
http://www.itif.org/publications/2014/12/15/middle-kingdom-galapagos-island-syndrome-cul-de-sac-chinese-technology
43 “Innovation Union Scoreboard 2015”, European Commission, 2015. http://ec.europa.eu/growth/industry/innovation/facts-figures/scoreboards/files/ius-2015_en.pdf The measurement framework used in the Innovation Union Scoreboard distinguishes between three main types of indicators and eight innovation dimensions, capturing a total of 25 different indicators. The enablers capture the main drivers of innovation performance external to the firm and cover three innovation dimensions: human resources; open, excellent and attractive research systems; and finance and support. Firm activities capture the innovation efforts at the level of the firm, grouped in three innovation dimensions: firm investments, linkages and entrepreneurship, and intellectual assets. Outputs cover the effects of firms’ innovation activities in two innovation dimensions: innovators and economic effects.
